Workers Solidarity Movement

Panel from the 2018 Dublin Anarchist bookfair on the intersection between race politics, class and gender in Ireland with a particular focus on the current housing struggles and the Together for Yes referendum campaign / Repeal movement. [audio]

Get your Dublin Anarchist Bookfair t-shirt! [ONLINE SALES ARE NOW CLOSED]
  

The 12th Dublin Anarchist Bookfair took place on the 15th September 2018 at the Teachers Club 35 Parnell square and on the evening of the 14th at Wynns hotel.  Every year hundreds of people attend the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair for a day of inspiring discussions and the opportunity of meeting lots of other radicals, browsing books and meeting campaigns.

We will be uploading about a dozen audio and video recordings of the panels at the bookfair, follow us on Twitter or Facebook to get notification of new uploads or check Anarchist bookfair

The WSM is not organising the 12th Dublin Anarchist Bookfair for the spring of 2017 as might be expected. Instead, we are organising an alternative event, the Anarchist Gathering.  

The Anarchist Gathering 2017 will take place on Sunday, 23nd April, 10am-5pm in the Teacher’s Club (36, Parnell Square West, Dublin 1). Please reply to activity@wsm.ie to register your interest in attending. We are gathering to discuss how we can better organise and fight for a free society. We would hope that everyone actively interested in building anarchism in Ireland will attend.

The following piece maps out our thinking about the bookfair at the present moment.

In solidarity, 

WSM Dublin Anarchist Bookfair Committee.

The 9th Belfast anarchist bookfair takes place this weekend 14 October - 16 October with the main bookfair events being at the Black Box 19-22 Hill Street, on Saturday from 11.30am to 5pm.  On Friday night there are events at Just Books 22 Berry Street, Belfast

Below  you will find information about the 11th Dublin anarchist bookfair which took place in 2016.  The bookfair consists of stalls from campaigns and book suppliers plus about a dozen meetings on everything from anarchist feminism to Rojava solidarity to radical Irish history.  

The audio recording of the Bodily Autonomy at the Intersections panel at the 11th Dublin Anarchist bookfair.

One hundred years after the vigorous labour organising of Jim Larkin, James Connolly, Rosie Hackett, and Louis Bennett in Ireland, we still remember the old labour slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all”.

But in their present structure, are trade unions nothing more than an arm of the state and of the bosses? Do unions function more to control workers rather than advance their interests? Can the major unions be reformed from within, or should we start building new ones? Are militant trade unionists ‘wreckers’, or the future of the labour movement?

Recent years in Ireland have seen growing community based resistance to the imposition of austerity programs: the introduction of regressive taxes such as the property tax and water charges, and the homelessness crisis as a direct consequence.

The ongoing attempt to establish Irish Water, a state backed water utility company, designed to pave the way for privatisation of our water and infrastructure, has been met with unprecedented broad based resistance from communities across the country.

Similarly the obscene growth in homelessness across the country is being met with growing grassroots resistance through groups such as the Dublin Tenants Association and Irish Housing Network.

The environmental crisis represents ‘one of the gravest and most severe existential threats to our species survival’. International agreements aimed at curbing fossil fuel emissions have largely been a failure, with the most recent Paris CoP21 conference labelled ‘a fraud and a fake’ by leading climatologist and activist James Hansen. Capitalism’s unrelenting assault on the natural environment has pushed us past the point of continuing any pretence of ‘safe carbon mitigation’. It is becoming more widely accepted that we now need a global restructuring of the economic mode of production; capitalism must be dissolved.